As I read through the running threads of comments from readers, former readers, lovers and haters of the Times-Dispatch -- here at Style Weekly and here at the Times-Dispatch itself -- about today's layoffs, it strikes me a bit odd (and somewhat amusing) that so many people see this story in a vacuum.
Never mind the ground shifting beneath the feet of the entire news industry -- the cultural shift in how we create and consume information; the implosion that has rattled the cages of every English-language print publication in the world (except for Brazil and India, where they are apparently booming); the broken advertising model in search of reinvention; the demise of a strong editorial voice and focus and energy in many newsrooms; the transition from productivity to entitlement throughout news organizations.
At an even more macro level, never mind the economic model that created a market for unsustainable growth; an ever-widening gap between salaries at the top of organizations and at the bottom; a loss of focus on what makes a business sustainable, relevant or valuable. Never mind an economy built on an executive reward system that pays absurd sums for bad ideas, financially disastrous risks and lost revenues.
My point? Two of them in this post.
The first: Where was all the management-versus-worker bitching when Wachovia Securities eviscerated its workforce, or when Qimonda left its people in the lurch, or when LandAmerica and Circuit City swallowed their own tails?
The second: Why do we see the Times-Dispatch is such a different light, as if it isn't at the heart of things a corporation that is suffering from many of the same mistakes as it corporate peers? While that doesn't make things any easier for the former employees who are now at a significant crossroads in their careers and lives, or for those left with the unenviable task of reinventing a dying form, it seems to me to be a helluva lot more honest than holding the Times-Dispatch up as some sacred trust. When newspapers decided they wanted to be businesses, they implicitly signed on to grow by and to die by the sword of capitalism.
On another front, former TD employee and blogger Rus Wornom posits that the "suits" are just readying the paper for its own demise -- "deliberate and eventual suicide." I'm not sure I see it that way -- all I've seen, from all corners of the paper over the past several years, are people at every level trying, and largely failing, to figure out the future.
Just like every other industry in America these days.
This isn't a Times-Dispatch problem, or a newspaper problem, exclusively.
Just ask Detroit.
